Bitter News, 9-16-09

• Tax attorney William Halby was given a not-so-happy ending this week when a tax court denied deductions of more than $100,000 that Halby spent on porn and sluts, which he claimed as medical expenses. Mainly because he didn’t have receipts? “The 77-year-old Brooklyn lawyer owes tens of thousands of dollars in back taxes for wrongly deducting more than $300,000 in prostitutes, porn, sex toys and erotic massages” [Tax Prof Blog via Overlawyered]

• “Fallen billionaire R. Allen Stanford, his assets frozen and his company’s insurance refusing to pay, was appointed an attorney from the federal public defender’s office Tuesday.” Kent Schaffer, a Houston private-practice lawyer who been assigned to the case, must be feeling like his palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy cuz opportunity comes once in a lifetime, yo. [Houston Chronicle]

• Per the Secretary of Health and Human Services, swine flu vaccine manufacturers are now immune from lawsuits resulting from swine flu immunizations. You die, you deal with it. [Examiner.com]

• It’s the third-annual ranking of Canadian law schools, ya’ll! And Maclean’s, which must be some great northern version of U.S. News, is laying the smack down, with University of Toronto Faculty of Law ruling as king of the snow heap three years running. [Maclean’s]

• Dear Judge: If you wouldn’t mind, can we not tell our conspiracy and fraud trial jury about the computer and trading notebook that we burned and now pretend is lost so it can’t be introduced as evidence? Oh, and we could also omit letting them in on the fact that we’re filthy rich after years of scamming investors? Thanks for understanding. You know what hard-ons juries have for fund managers these days. [Wall Street Journal]

• Dear Judge: We couldn’t even find a vein to lethally inject the rat bastard. So we’re going to delay this execution, and after a bunch of legal challenges, we’ll try another one later. K? Thx. [CBS News]

• Orly Taitz, the lawyer who’s the face of the “birther” movement” (the people who believe the President Obama doesn’t meet the Constitution’s eligibility requirements for his job), received a “fairly epic smackdown” from a federal judge and has been put on notice about filing frivolous lawsuits. [Salon]